American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (28 page)

There was a little bit of a competition between myself and some of the other snipers during this deployment, to see who got the most kills. Not that we had all that much to do with the numbers—they were more a product of how many targets we had to shoot at. It’s just the luck of the draw—you want to have the highest numbers, but there’s not much you can do about it.

I did want to be the top sniper. At first, there were three of us who had the most kills; then two of us started pulling away. My “competition” was in my sister platoon, working on the east side of the city. His totals shot up at one point, pulling ahead.

Our big boss man happened to be on our side of the city, and he was keeping track of how the platoons were doing. As part of that, he had the sniper totals. He tweaked me a little as the other sniper pulled in front.

“He’s gonna break your record,” he’d tease. “You better get on that gun more.”

Well, things evened out real fast—all of a sudden I seemed to have every stinkin’ bad guy in the city running across my scope. My totals shot up, and there was no catchin’ me.

Luck of the draw.

I
f you’re interested, the confirmed kills were only kills that someone else witnessed, and cases where the enemy could be confirmed dead. So if I shot someone in the stomach and he managed to crawl around where we couldn’t see him before he bled out, he didn’t count.

W
ORKING WITH THE
A
RMY

W
ith the initial attacks dying down after a couple of days, we foot-patrolled back to COP Falcon from Four Story. There we met with the captain of the force, and told him that we wanted to be based out of Falcon rather than having to go all the way back to Camp Ramadi every few days.

He gave us the in-law suite. We were the Army’s in-laws.

We also told him that we would help him clear whatever area he wanted. His job was to clear the city around COP Falcon, and ours was to help him.

“What’s the worst spot you got?” we asked.

He pointed it out.

“That’s where we’re going,” we said.

He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“You guys are crazy,” he said. “You can have that house, you can outfit it however you want, you can go wherever you want. But I want you to know—I’m not coming to get you if you go out there. There are too many IEDs, I’m going to lose a tank. I can’t do it.”

L
ike a lot of the Army, I’m sure the captain initially looked at us skeptically. They all assumed we thought we were better than they were, that we had out-sized egos and shot off our mouths without being able to back it up. Once we proved to them that we didn’t think we were better than them—more experienced, yes, but not stuck up, if you know what I mean—then they usually came around. We formed strong working relationships with the units, and even friendships that lasted after the war.

The captain’s unit was doing cordon and search operations, where they would take an entire block and search it. We started working with them. We’d do daylight presence patrols—the idea was to make civilians see troops on a regular basis, gaining more confidence that they were going to be protected, or that at least we were there to stay. We would put half the platoon on an overwatch while the rest patrolled.

A lot of these overwatches would be near Four Story. The guys downstairs would patrol and almost always be contacted. I’d be upstairs with other snipers and nail whoever was trying to attack them.

Or we would bump out five hundred yards, six or eight hundred yards, going deep into Injun territory to look and wait for the bad guys. We’d set up on overwatch ahead of one of his patrols. As soon as his people showed up, they’d draw all sorts of insurgents toward them. We’d take them down. The bad guys would turn and try and fire on us; we’d pick them off. We were protectors, bait, and slayers.

After a few days, the captain came up to us and said, “Y’all are bad-ass. I don’t care where you go, if you need me, I’m comin’ to get you. I’ll drive the tank to the front door.”

And from that moment on, he had our faith and our back.

I
was on overwatch at Four Story one morning when some of our guys started doing a patrol nearby. As they moved to cross the street, I spotted some insurgents coming down J Street, which was one of the main roads in that area.

I took down a couple. My guys scattered. Not knowing what was going on, someone asked over the radio why the hell I was shooting at them.

“I’m shooting over your head,” I told him. “Look down the street.”

Insurgents started feeding into the area and a huge firefight erupted. I saw one guy with an RPG; I got him in my crosshairs, squeezed easy on the trigger.

He fell.

A few minutes later, one of his friends came out to grab the rocket launcher.

He fell.

This went on for quite a while. Down the block, another insurgent with an AK tried to get a shot on my boys. I took him down—then took down the guy who came to get his gun, and the next one.

Target-rich environment?! Hell, there were piles of insurgents littering the road. They finally gave up and disappeared. Our guys continued to patrol. The
jundi
s saw action that day; two of them died in a firefight.

It was tough to keep track of how many kills I got that day, but I believe the total was the highest I’d ever had in a single day.

W
e knew we were in good with the Army captain when he came over to us one day and said, “Listen, y’all gotta do one thing for me. Before I get shipped out of here, I want to shoot my main tank gun one time. All right? So call me.”

It wasn’t too long after that we got in a firefight and we got his unit on the radio. We called him over, and he got his tank in and he got his shot.

There were a lot more in the days that followed. By the time he left Ramadi, he’d shot it thirty-seven times.

P
RAYERS AND
B
ANDOLIERS

B
efore every op, a bunch of the platoon would gather and say a prayer. Marc Lee would lead it, usually speaking from the heart rather than reciting a memorized prayer.

I didn’t pray every time going out, but I did thank God every night when I got back.

There was one other ritual when we returned: cigars.

A few of us would get together and smoke them at the end of an op. In Iraq, you can get Cubans; we smoked Romeo y Julieta No. 3s. We’d light up to top off the day.

I
n a way, we all thought we were invincible. In another way, we also accepted the fact that we could die.

I didn’t focus on death, or spend much time thinking about it. It was more like an idea, lurking in the distance.

I
t was during this deployment that I invented a little wrist bandolier, a small bullet-holder that allowed me to easily reload without disturbing my gun setup.

I took a holder that had been designed to be strapped on a gun stock and cut it up. Then I arranged some cord through it and tied it to my left wrist.

Generally, when I fired, I would have my fist balled up under the gun to help me aim. That brought the bandolier close. I could fire, take my right hand, and grab more bullets, and keep my eye sighted through the scope at all times.

A
s lead sniper, I tried to help the new guys, telling them what details to look for. You could tell someone was an insurgent not just by the fact that he was armed but by the way he moved. I started giving advice I’d been given back at the beginning of Fallujah, a battle that by now seemed like a million years ago.

“Dauber, don’t be afraid to pull the trigger,” I’d tell the younger sniper. “If it’s within the ROEs, you take him.”

A little bit of hesitation was common for the new guys. Maybe all Americans are a little hesitant to be the first to shoot, even when it’s clear that we’re under attack, or will be shortly.

Our enemy seemed to have no such problem. With a little experience, our guys didn’t, either.

But you could never tell how a guy was going to perform under the stress of combat. Dauber did real well—real well. But I noticed that, for some snipers, the extra strain made them miss shots that they would have no trouble with in training. One guy in particular—an excellent guy and a good SEAL—went through a spell where he was missing quite a lot.

You just couldn’t tell how someone was going to react.

R
amadi was infested with insurgents, but there was a large civilian population. Sometimes they’d wander into firefights. You’d wonder what the hell they were thinking.

One day, we were in a house in another part of the city. We’d engaged a bunch of insurgents, killing quite a few, and were waiting through a lull in the action. The bad guys were probably nearby, waiting for another chance to attack.

Insurgents normally put small rocks in the middle of the road to warn others where we were. Civilians usually saw the rocks and quickly realized what was going on. They always stayed far away. Hours might pass before we saw any people again—and, of course, by that point, the people we would be seeing would have guns and be trying to kill us.

For some reason, this car came flying over the rocks and floored it, speeding toward us and passing all sorts of dead men on the way.

I threw a flash-crash but the grenade didn’t get the driver to stop. So, I fired into the front of the car. The bullet went through the engine compartment. He stopped and bailed out of the car, yelling as he hopped around.

Two women were with him in the car. They must have been the stupidest people in the city, because even with all that had happened, they were oblivious to us or the danger around them. They started coming toward our house. I threw another flash grenade and finally they started moving back in the direction they’d come. Finally, they seemed to notice some of the bodies that were littered around and started screaming.

They seem to have gotten away okay, except for the foot wound. But it was a miracle they hadn’t been killed.

T
he pace was hot and heavy. It made us want more. We ached for it. When the bad guys were hiding, we tried to dare them into showing themselves so we could take them down.

One of the guys had a bandanna, which we took and fashioned into a kind of mummy head. Equipped with goggles and a helmet, it looked almost like a soldier—certainly at a few hundred yards. So we attached it to a pole and held it up over the roof, trying to draw fire one day when the action slowed. It brought a couple of insurgents out and we bagged them.

W
e were just slaughtering them.

There were times when we were so successful on overwatch that I thought our guys on the street were starting to get a little careless. I once spotted them going down the middle of the street, rather than using the side and ducking into the little cover area provided by the walls and openings.

I called down on the radio.

“Hey, y’all need to be going cover to cover,” I told them, scolding them gently.

“Why?” answered one of my platoon mates. “You’ve got us covered.”

He may have been joking, but I took it seriously.

“I can’t protect you from something I don’t see,” I said. “If I don’t see a glint or movement, the first time I know he’s there is when he shoots. I can get him after he’s shot you, but that’s not going to help you.”

H
eading back to Shark Base one night, we got involved in another firefight, a quick hit-and-run affair. At some point, a frag came over and exploded near some of the guys.

The insurgents ran off, and we picked ourselves back up and got going.

“Brad, what’s with your leg?” someone in the platoon asked.

He looked down. It was covered with blood.

“Nothin’,” he said.

It turned out he’d caught a piece of metal in his knee. It may not have hurt then—I don’t know how true that is, since no SEAL has ever actually admitted feeling pain since the beginning of Creation—but when he got back to Shark Base, it was clear the wound wasn’t something he could just blow off. Shrapnel had wedged itself behind his patella. He needed to be operated on.

He was airlifted out, our first casualty in Ramadi.

T
HE
C
ONSTANT
G
ARDENER

O
ur sister platoon was on the east side of the city, helping the Army put in COPs there. And to the north, the Marines were doing their thing, taking areas, holding and clearing them of insurgents.

We went back for a few days to work with the Marines when they took down a hospital north of the city on the river.

The insurgents were using the hospital as a gathering point. As the Marines came in, a teenager, I’d guess about fifteen, sixteen, appeared on the street and squared up with an AK-47 to fire at them.

I dropped him.

A minute or two later, an Iraqi woman came running up, saw him on the ground, and tore off her clothes. She was obviously his mother.

I’d see the families of the insurgents display their grief, tear off clothes, even rub the blood on themselves.
If you loved them,
I thought,
you should have kept them away from the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?